A Cold Kind of Beauty

Seattle in October has a cold kind of beauty. But the cold is soft. In a way it is kind and voluptuous. A swaddling that’s a soothing followup to the encasing of a tropical womb. Through the clarity of chilled air you can run your hands over the crisp textures of the horizon, and they will make the corners of your mouth turn up. You pat the cotton candy of low-lying clouds tangled in tree branches and spilling over hills, and tap the toothy peaks of the now burning now ice cold Olympic mountains. You slide your palms over the silver platter of Elliot Bay, serving up ponderous cargo ships that are the starch and staple of modern life. These ships too have a cold kind of beauty, agents of a small world crossing time zones hemispheres and seasons, navigating nationless waters where only the laws of commerce apply. Their faces are at once rusty relics and timeless symbols of this still new port city, once of wood and leather now of glass and digital gold.